Phineas Finn: The Irish Member by Anthony Trollope

Phineas Finn: The Irish Member by Anthony Trollope

 serialized 1867-88, published as a book 1868

 

I was travelling to Ireland for my recent holiday, reading this book, and suddenly realized that Phineas Finn was making my exact journey in reverse: he was travelling by boat to Holyhead in North Wales, then the train to London. I was doing the opposite (and of course duplicated his journey later) – we crossed at Euston Square.  

Finn was coming to take up his seat at the House of Commons, while I was just bound for merry-making and culture and food in Dublin - but obviously the right book to blog on now, still fresh in my memory.

Dublin in the 1860s

I move around Anthony Trollope’s novels with no plan or order, and am always likely to read one that someone recommended. This book is one of the Palliser novels, and I already covered the first in the series, Can You Forgive Her?, a while back – several posts, and one of my favourites of his books so far. This is the second in the series, and Trollope apparently said that the fourth, Phineas Redux, 1873-4, was really just part 2 of this one. I will get to it.

So – Phineas Finn is a young Irishman on the make: he has been studying to be a lawyer, but suddenly gets the chance to become an MP for an Irish seat. He takes the chance and wins (hardly a spoiler given the subtitle of the book) leaves his sweetheart behind, and heads for the political life in London. His father is a respectable doctor, and Phineas takes with him the hopes and dreams of the family, along with most of their money. The finances of a young man in London are always a serious issue for Trollope – there is no pay for being an MP so Finn is very poor. As apparently is essential for annoying heroes, Finn also signs as guarantor for another man’s debt. This was a big feature in Framley Parsonage of recent memory. WHY do they do this? WHY do they get dumped with debts that ‘no honest man could pay’ (in the words of Bruce Springsteen) when they don’t even get any benefit from the money?

The rest of his story is very interesting, with a proviso coming soon, as he makes his way through friendships, romances, a different seat in the Commons and some successes.

I had no qualms about skim-reading everything about politics and everything about hunting (‘there were more than 200 men out’) - two of Trollope’s great obsessions - which meant that the book was much shorter and very readable indeed. The personal relationships were extremely well done. Phineas is very attractive to women, and dithers his way among three different candidates (not giving too much thought to the fourth, whom he left behind in Ireland) and you genuinely don’t know how this is going to end up, and genuinely care.

The women are as different as could be, and very three-dimensional characters.

Earlier this year, a throwaway post about a woman in a riding habit in a Trollope book led to a most fascinating and erudite discussion in the comments on the Marriage Plot in Victorian fiction – I strongly recommend the Below the Line section to readers. Phineas Finn  was mentioned in the comments, because of the character of Lady Laura, who enters into a disastrous marriage. Trollope understood coercive control before it was invented - and at a time when his contemporary male authors, on the whole, would not have had a clue. Laura’s husband isn’t violent or mean or cruel, but their relationship is heart-stopping, bone-chilling, and her predicament awful. And yet:

She could not write to her father and beg to be taken away, because her husband would read a sermon to her on Sunday evening.

And Trollope always has his own realism:

Anything would be better than that the servants should know that there was a quarrel. But every servant in the house had known all about it for the last three hours.

There are more cheerful takes on marriage. I liked this discussion between two women, about potential future husbands:

"It seems to me that all your reasons are reasons why he should marry me;—not reasons why I should marry him."

"Is not his love for you a reason?"

"No," said Violet, pausing… “And as for that business of saving him—"

"You know what I mean!"

"I don't know that I have any special mission for saving young men. I sometimes sometimes think that I shall have quite enough to do to save myself."

 

Phineas Finn is an interesting character, and not (in my view) always the most admirable of men. He is very changeable and unreliable – other characters come over much better than he. It is clear that women find him very attractive:

At the present moment he had on his head a Scotch cap with a grouse's feather in it, and he was dressed in a velvet shooting-jacket and dark knickerbockers; and was certainly, in this costume, as handsome a man as any woman would wish to see.

His story is very compelling, and I am looking forward to reading more about his career in the next book.

I was not a big fan of Orley Farm, the last Trollope I read. That was a disagreeable book. But Phineas Finn is - agreeable.

While looking in to all this, I was interested to find that until the BBC made a famous drama series from the books, they were known as the Parliamentary Novels: the idea of 'Pallisers' comes from the TV programmes.

I didn’t watch that at all, but was delighted to find that Phineas Finn was played by Donal McCann, a marvellous Irish actor who also played the key role of Gabriel in John Huston’s film of The Dead. It is based on a work by James Joyce that is my favourite short story of all time. The closing lines are transcendent – and McCann does justice to them. (Blogpost here – an early entry, and have always been tremendously pleased with the photo I found to represent Gretta listening to the singing)

Two women – one of them a bride – from NYPL.

Man standing, also NYPL.

The suit is actually described as a ‘Scotch costume’, NYPL again.

Photo of Dublin – Grafton St -  in the 1860s from the National Library of Ireland.